ML-BPM: Multi-Teacher Learning with Bidirectional Photometric Mixing for Open Compound Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

"Open compound domain adaptation (OCDA) considers the target domain as the compound of multiple unknown homogeneous subdomains. The goal of OCDA is to minimize the domain gap between the source domain and the compound target domain, which brings the benefit of the model generalization to the unseen domains. Current OCDA for semantic segmentation methods adopt manual domain separation and employ a single model to adapt to all the target subdomains simultaneously. However, adapting to a target subdomain hinders the model from adapting to other dissimilar target subdomains, which leads to limited performance. In this work, we introduce a multi-teacher framework with bidirectional photometric mixing to adapt to every target subdomain separately. First, we present an automatic domain separation to find the optimal number of subdomains. On this basis, we propose a multi-teacher framework in which each teacher model uses the bidirectional photometric mixing to adapt to one target subdomain. Furthermore, we conduct an adaptive distillation to learn a student model and apply consistency regularization to improve the student generalization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for both the compound domain and the open domains against existing state-of-the-art approaches."